This paper joins the debate on the relationship between inequality and the environment. Departing from the past contributions, which focused either on the theories of environmental behavior or on ...economic interests, this paper develops arguments about “political choice” mechanisms that help explain the linkages between inequality and national policymaking related to the establishment of protected areas. A cross-national analysis of the interactions between inequality, democracy and the legal designation of protected areas in a global sample of 137 countries shows that, ceteris paribus, the effects of inequality vary depending on the strength of democracy: in relatively democratic countries inequality is associated with less land in protected areas, whereas in relatively undemocratic countries the reverse is true. The highly significant effects of inequality undermine the democratic dividend in the arena of nature conservation.
Citizen satisfaction with democracy is greater when parties offer choices that are congruent with voter preferences. But are citizens content with simply having a party that represents their views or ...does their satisfaction depend on whether that party can also be instrumental in implementing policies? We argue that instrumentality moderates the effect of ideological congruence on democratic satisfaction. Combining an analysis of cross‐national survey data with an experimental conjoint design, we find that citizens able to vote for a congruent party with a chance of entering government are more satisfied with democracy, whereas congruence without instrumentality has no such effect.
We develop a state capacity framework to account for different national responses to Covid-19. Our starting point is the influential idea that neoliberalism has a major role to play in state failure ...to control the pandemic. By implementing neoliberal reforms, states have ostensibly rendered themselves incapable of preventing or mitigating the viral outbreak. A focus on the British experience lends weight to this perspective. But when viewed in a comparative light, the picture is less straightforward. By comparing the British and Australian cases, we see a similar embrace of neoliberal reforms across the whole of government, yet with strikingly divergent outcomes. How can we account for this dramatic difference? To answer this question, we offer an enhanced state capacity framework to improve our understanding of diverse national responses to Covid-19. Our larger objective is to enrich the existing state capacity literature in two ways. First, we extend the existing state capacity framework by introducing a new category - salutary capacity - to encapsulate a state's ability to correct and counteract the course of a national health emergency. Second, we introduce the idea of political choice to emphasise the importance of agency in offsetting the institutional weaknesses associated with neoliberal reform.
Previous research suggests that voting in elections is influenced by appearance-based personality inferences (e.g., whether a political candidate has a competent-looking face). However, since voters ...cannot objectively evaluate politicians’ personality traits, it remains to be seen whether appearance-based inferences about a characteristic continue to influence voting when clear information about that characteristic is available. The authors examine the impact of appearance-based inferences for a characteristic that is well known about candidates: their political affiliation. Across two studies, the authors show that U.S. candidates facing conservative electorates benefit from looking more stereotypically Republican than their rivals (controlling for gender, ethnicity, and age). In contrast, no relationship between political facial stereotypes and voting is found for liberal electorates (using identical controls). The authors further show that this contrast between liberal and conservative electorates has more to do with individual-level differences between liberal and conservative voters than with macro-level differences between liberal and conservative states.
Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that ...may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.
The recent phenomenon of growing urbanization in India has shifted the focus from rural vote to urban vote in electoral politics. The discussion on urban politics and urban vote revolves largely ...around two issues—first the issue of turnout and second, a somewhat different political choice among the urban voters compared to the rural voters. The two issues have been highlighted by the fact that urban constituencies have registered lower turnout compared to the turnout in rural constituencies. Among the former, the constituencies of big metropolitan cities register much lower turnout compared to the constituencies of small and medium towns. Results of various elections in the past indicate that the backbone of electoral support of the BJP during the late 1990s is its strong support among the urban voters. The BJP’s strong support base among the urban voters enabled it to emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha during the 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha elections enabling it to form a coalition government along with other regional parties. This article tries to seek answers to the question, why do we see this distinct difference in voting patterns among rural and urban voters, especially till 2009 Lok Sabha elections, though it has changed somewhat during the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections? Is it because the rural India and Urban India represent two different kinds of voters, or is it because the issues and concerns of rural and urban voters are vastly different from each other which make them vote differently?
Although democracies should ideally elect leaders based on their abilities, voters are often biased by seemingly unrelated factors, such as a candidate's appearance. Prior work examining the ...relations between election outcomes and appearance has primarily focused on a restricted range of the top candidates, examined in pairwise comparisons. In the present study, we tested whether the predictive ability of ratings based on facial appearance would extend to a wider range of candidates. Specifically, we examined whether individuals in the US could predict outcomes in the 2011 Bulgarian presidential elections by evaluating the facial appearance of 18 candidates. The large number of candidates naturally running for the high level office allowed us to accurately test the strength of the relationship between judgments of facial appearance and election outcomes across a broad range of faces. We found that a strong correlation between ratings of facial competence and election outcomes persisted across the full range of candidates, and that US participants' hypothetical choices paralleled actual Bulgarian election outcomes. We demonstrated that competence ratings were more effective at predicting election outcomes than judgments on a variety of other characteristics deemed important by Bulgarian voters as well as ratings of attractiveness. Furthermore, judgments of competence largely drove the correlation between hypothetical and actual votes.
► We examine whether judgments of faces could predict Presidential election results. ► US participants' hypothetical choices paralleled actual Bulgarian election outcomes. ► We found strong correlations between facial competence and election outcomes. ► Results persisted across the full range of 18 candidates.
Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that ...may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Two studies assessed the predictive validity of implicit political attitudes in relation to voting behavior. In Study 1, we demonstrated the validity of the adopted measure (i.e., the IAT; Greenwald, ...McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) with a sample of voters who clearly sided with one of the opposing parties. In Study 2, implicit political preferences were measured in a sample of undecided voters one month before the election, and actual voting behavior was assessed immediately after the election. Results demonstrated that implicit political attitudes were good predictors of future voting behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis of the presence of embryonic attitudes even in the case of those voters who at the explicit and conscious level deny any preference for one of the two opposing candidates.
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